Marty Andrews

artful code

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

CI Demo Part 3 - Maven Build

At the Sydney Geek Night this week, I spent spent some time with Mike Cannon-Brookes putting a Maven build on my template application. Ok, I just sat back and watched while Mike did his thing, but in any case, I learned a bit about Maven.

The biggest eye-opener for me was the slashing and burning Mike did on the default script. The conversation kind of went like this:

Mike: "Ok, so lets grab this sample script off the documentation as a starting point. This section here is pointless, so we'll get rid of that. You don't need this bit here either. We'll throw away this crap as well..."

Me: "Whats the deal with all these reports here?"

Mike: "Oh yeah - most of those are irrelevant, so we'll get rid of these ones"

Within a few minutes, we had a working build up. It took a while to run the first few goals, because it downloaded a bunch of jars get started. Once it was done though, it did almost the same thing as my Ant build but with much less time spent on development.